October 4, 2012

An American SLayer In Europe<p>From time to time, I get the opportunity to travel and work with various groups and organizations around the world. S

From time to time, I get the opportunity to travel and work with various groups and organizations around the world. Sometimes these adventures take place on the conference floor manning the SoftLayer booth trying to best khazzy’s sub 47 second time on the server challenge, talking with passersby about the wonderfulness that is the SoftLayer API or even amazing audiences with my switch-ball skills. While these events are a staple in the life of a Development Community Advocate I have had the fortune to speak at engagements and more recently work with the guys and gals that make our Startup program, Catalyst, possible.

I traveled with our Catalyst group to London in an effort to work with the Springboard and Seedcamp incubator groups. It is such a refreshing experience to work with companies that are on the cutting edge, grabbing the straps of their boots and tugging themselves into some amazing ideas. We spoke with Shhmooze who is working to change the way we meet persons of interest at events, 24symbols - the Spotify for ebooks and many more whose energy and ingenuity is a reminder that this world we live in can change with the clack of a key and the shake of a hand.

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From London we ventured to Amsterdam to meet up with Appsterdam, a community focused on mobile application development. I was invited to conduct a Guru Session; an informal, nitty gritty knowledge sharing event that thrives on discussion and interaction. This session was a bit out of the normal for this group however, as I am not a mobile application developer.

The focus was to be on creating the server assistance many mobile applications make use of. My carefully planned session, full of example code and CCIs image templates installed with all of the necessary prerequisites quickly, deteriorated. But, even though the planned exercises were not the best fit for the group, what’s past is prologue, and set the stage for a great discussion covering Drupal, infrastructure architecture, the perils of using app servers as a pass-through to a CDN and even MongoDB.

Many places explored, conversations had, lessons learned and the opportunity to interact with so many impassioned people: all in all a great experience.